Day In The Life: Anesthesiology

I did a 2-week anesthesiology rotation before starting my 3-week hibernation for boards-studying. Truth be told, I was a little scared and starting to regret being on a rotation instead of being on vacation to study, but thank the heavens that Anesthesiology is probably one of the chillest rotations (aka the best rotation I could’ve been on aside from Radiology) I’ve had to date.

For the record, I’m combining my usual Reflections + Day-In-The-Life‘s into one post for this one!

On July 3rd, I walked into the hospital and was greeted by a pitch-black surgeons’ lounge, a blank schedule, and an empty OR…so I went home to study.

A Typical Day

Each morning would start at 7 a.m. I’d look at the schedule in the office to see which cases I wanted to stand in on for the day. After I got to know the different nurse anesthetists a little better, I’d usually choose based on which ones I liked working with more (aka the ones who liked to teach, and didn’t mind explaining things to me, or having me asking questions).

There was a lot of downtime between surgeries, especially when I was trying to get more experience with intubating, and was just jumping from room to room. I started keeping a book or a pile of notes in my pockets so I could do some reading in between cases.

I will not lie–there were definitely a couple instances where I sank into the couch in the office (it’s like curling up into a pile of soft, puffy clouds!) to do some reading…and fell asleep. ._. Thankfully, the nurses liked me, so they’d let me sleep til a case popped up, and then wake me up for it.

I’d go talk to each of the patients before the case to introduce myself, ask if they had any questions, ask a bunch of preoperative questions and make an amateur classification of them on the Mallampati scale. I got to practice a lot of intubations (my success rate was not that wonderful, but as they say, at least I was honest about it!

I also had the opportunity to watch a wholeee ton of different procedures, including, but not limited to…

• Hysterectomy
• BKA (below-the-knee amputation)
• Abdominal hernia repair
• Cholecystectomy
• Pelvic laparoscopy
• Thyroidectomy
• Knee arthroscopy
• Hip replacement
• Knee articulation
• Tonsillectomy
• Adenoidectomy
• Appendectomy

On my second-last day, we had 39 cases, with the last one scheduled to start at 11:30 p.m.

Yes, 11:30 p.m.

I’d been assured/reassured on multiple occasions that this was a very laidback rotation, and that I was free to study and do whatever I wanted, but…it isn’t in my nature to ever leave unless someone tells me it’s okay to, even if I happen to be freaking about about needing to study for boards. I did not take a single sick day for the entirety of my third year, which, in retrospect, was probably a terrible idea on a couple occasions (especially my Cardiology brain-fog).

…so I hopped from case to case until around 5 p.m., the nurse anesthetist I was working with turned and asked me, “You know you’re allowed to leave whenever you want, right?”

I stayed for the end of that case, and then went home to get some more studying done before heading off to my last-ish (hopefully I’ll be back in September!) BJJ class at the academy. We went out for food afterward and talked til past 1 a.m.! I’m going to miss them a ton! :[

Meals

I’d usually bring my lunch and store it in the residents’ lounge + eat there when there was a spare moment, but I did get free lunch a couple times!

Once was when I went to tumor board. One of the cases involved a lady who found out she had cancer in her left breast because her cat (who had slept at the foot of her bed for all his life) started sleeping on the left side of her chest! (She’s okay because she went to go get it checked out due to aforementioned strange cat behavior!)

D: I guess you could call that…a cat scan.
(crowd goes wild everyone bursts into amused chuckles)
D: I’ve waited my whole life to be able to say that!

Yay for free lunch!

Frozen Raspberry Lemon Pie! :O

Parking

Parking was super easy to find at the hospital, especially since we started at 7 a.m. every morning!

Housing

This rotation marked the beginnings of my couch-surfing life! I officially don’t have a home, but will be living on various couches, friends’ houses+apartments and student housing from now until I graduate!

This is where I lived for 2 weeks! :O

• Do you have the same problem with falling asleep when sinking into insanely comfortable couches? The struggle is real. :[
• Have you ever heard of a pet identifying a potential health issue? I’ve heard about that on the news before, but that’s a first for me in real life!